Australian MP sets river on fire to protest over local gas mining

Australian Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham posted a video of himself lighting Queensland's Condamine River on fire. He blames a nearby fracking site. (Photo courtesy: Jeremy Buckingham)

Australian MP is blaming seeping methane from a nearby fracking site for making it possible for him to set Queensland’s Condamine River on fire.

In an act of protest against coal seam fracking, the Australian Greens party MP Jeremy Buckinghamset fire to methane gas bubbling up through Queensland, Australia’s Condamine River

Jeremy Buckingham — a Greens party MP for New South Wales — posted a video of the incident to his Facebook page on Friday. As of Saturday afternoon, it had been shared more than 50,000 times.

“Unbelievable! A river on fire. Don’t let it burn the boat,” he says in the video. “The most incredible thing I’ve seen. A tragedy in the Murray-Darling Basin.”

The Murray-Darling Basin is the largest river system in southeastern Australia and a significant source of fresh water for drinking and agriculture.

Buckingham said the river burned for more than an hour. He believes the nearby coal seam gas (CSG) operations were to blame.

“This area has been drilled with thousands of CSG wells and fracked. This river for kilometres is bubbling with gas and now it’s on fire,” he said.

“This is the future of Australia and the Murray-Darling Basin if we do not stop the frackers who wants to spread across all states and territories … this is utterly unacceptable.”

The Greens are campaigning to ban fracking in Australia.

Professor Damian Barrett, the lead researcher into unconventional gas with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, has been monitoring the river’s gas seeps.

“The isotopic signature is telling us it’s coming from coal at that point in the landscape but coal is quite close to the surface and there’s a naturally existing small fault line, which cuts the river at that point,” he said.